Café Invites Dreams About Dunbar’s Future

By Carol Volkart

A village green? A new library with housing on top? Angle parking and special lighting to define the village’s heart? A farmers’ market and pop-ups in a long-vacant space? An alley transformed into a vibrant street?

Dream along with urban designer Scot Hein about Dunbar’s future, and those are the kinds of ideas that emerge.

A group of residents had just that experience recently when they joined Hein and several other urban experts on a walkabout of central Dunbar, followed by a planning session complete with a satellite map of Dunbar and colourful stickies to mark out their dreams.

The Sept. 26 tour was the start of a Dunbar Neighbourhood Café effort to get residents talking about the future of their neighbourhood. The goal is to get ahead of the city planning for Dunbar that’s slated to happen under the new official development plan. The plan designates high streets like Dunbar as neighbourhood centres, which will undergo area planning before the details are nailed down.

“This is a way of getting a jump on the planning and making sure our voices are heard,” said Café co-organizer Carmen Smith. “We all saw what happened with the Villages Plan when the city didn’t talk to residents about what it was imposing on their neighbourhoods.” She was referring to the city’s controversial plan to create 17 villages throughout Vancouver, which was rejected by council in July after a groundswell of public opposition.

Results from the Dunbar walkabout will go to a special two-hour Café aimed at getting a lively conversation going about Dunbar’s future. MCd by Michael Geller, the Oct. 16 event will include brief presentations from experts and residents, then an hour of audience discussion. The meeting will begin at 11 a.m. at St. Philip’s Church gym, with RSVPs required. Sign up at dunbarneighbourhoodcafe@gmail.com or click here.

Tour leader Hein, who was instrumental in the creation of the Arbutus Walk development on the old Carling O’Keefe site at 12^th and Arbutus, said the Dunbar exercise is “timely” in the wake of the Villages Plan debacle. The city must be thinking about its public engagement processes, he said, and Dunbar could end up being “champions for a better process.”

Hein said the walkabout and planning session would give residents a taste of what citizen-engaged planning could be like, but warned that to accomplish anything, “it has to be a formal, city-led process.

“It can’t just be you guys as advocates on your own dime. The city needs to own the outcome. They need to be staffing this, budgeting this and reporting out on this on behalf of taxpayers as a smart investment and a public process. Otherwise, you know, you’re just coming from the outside.”

A downbeat walk, an upbeat planning session

The Sept. 26 exercise, which included a dozen residents and four professionals, took two distinct forms and moods. First was an hour-long walk down the west side of Dunbar Street from West 26^th to West 30^th, past deserted storefronts and empty sidewalks, an in-your-face illustration of the problems the street is facing.

Then it was time for uplift and inspiration. Armed with coloured stickies and a satellite map of Dunbar under acetate, the group spent a three-hour planning session in a pretty room at St. Philip’s Church exploring the possibilities of what the community could become.

All was framed by Hein’s initial questions aimed at focusing the discussion on the bigger picture, not the street alone.  “What’s Dunbar’s essence, its identity?” he asked at the start of the tour. “Where’s its heart? Which sites are key, which are untouchable, which have unique development potential?”

The walkabout began on a high note outside Stong’s, where planner Lewis Silberberg, a retail specialist, noted its importance as a grocery anchor in the community. It has also done a good job of breaking up its long storefront with a coffee shop that spills out onto the street and adds vitality to the streetscape.

But once past the optimistic outburst of colourful small shops on the next corner at 27th, things rapidly went downhill.

The main problems were the high number of storefront vacancies — the highest on the west side, at 17 percent this year, up two points from last — and poor design, both of which suck the life out of a retail street.

‘So easy to kill a street’

The tour stopped in front of the old Dunbar Produce store, vacant and deteriorating since 2018, where Hein commented on the amount of vitality one vacant spot like that can remove from the street.  Considering how much activity Stong’s coffee shop generates all on its own, “you can appreciate how much that derelict frontage takes away. It’s so easy to kill a street.”

The group stopped again at the intersection of 28^th, where an old BMO office and a former Vancity/BMO building, both papered-over and long vacant, occupy each corner. “When you’ve got space sitting vacant for more than a year, it stigmatizes your retail precinct,” Silberberg said. “Just a fact.”

The vacant buildings sparked several comments from residents, who asked why nothing has been done to deal with the problem. Why don’t commercial property owners face vacancy taxes the way homeowners do? they asked.

Street design got a critical going-over, too, as residents remarked on the lifelessness of long flat walls of glass of the ground-floor retail of the new apartment buildings.

Silberberg said strata retail in buildings like that is a real problem because there’s no control over tenant mix, which can lead to vacant-looking offices lining the street. The 4400 block of Dunbar is a particular problem, he said, because it has strata retail on both sides of the street.

Tour participant Bruce Gilmour, who is blind, said his assistance dog Falina can’t find the doors into these buildings because there’s nothing to mark them out. Even Hein, who didn’t want to get too far down the rabbit hole of street aesthetics, remarked on so-called weather protection on one of the buildings — it’s 20 feet in the air, and wouldn’t protect anyone from the rain.

But Dunbar’s central area is blessed in some ways, mainly in that it has anchor tenants, those key retail and non-retail sites that tend to be around for the long-term. “The importance of these is huge,” Silberberg said. He noted this area  not only has Stong’s, Shoppers and London Drugs, but non-retail anchors like the library and community centre.

Former senior city planner Christina DeMarco also pointed out a plus that Dunbar residents seldom consider. With only 260 feet between intersections, cars don’t have time to speed up as much as in her own Point Grey Village, with its 700-foot-long blocks. “So when we look at the strengths of Dunbar, one is the shorter blocks,” she said, adding the free parking here is also a plus.

‘Dream a little bit’

While the street tour was all about the bleak reality of the present, the planning session was about potential for the future. That began with a look at where the street’s energy is now, and what sites can be built upon for the future.

Gathered around an acetate-covered satellite map of Dunbar, participants were handed cards of coloured dots to stick on it. Red dots were for the village heart, yellow for special sites and assets, blue for bus stops, and green for significant treed areas.

Participants could use as many as they wanted, and the focal points of the street soon became clear. Mounds of red and yellow dots soon piled up in three main areas – at Stong’s and Shoppers, the library, and the community centre.

Hein was also interested in what surrounded Dunbar Street, pointing to the map’s big areas of greenery –Memorial West Park, Chaldecott Park, and long avenues of massive trees. There were also the area’s many long-established institutions – St. George’s junior and senior schools, St. Philip’s Church, and the Immaculate Conception buildings.

“There’s a large institutional kind of energy pulsing through these bigger sites, which is not unlike what the Arbutus Lands was,” he said. “And so can you harness that, can you use that?”

He raised the idea of a “cultural, institutional, recreational constellation” – including parks and institutions – all being connected, with some kind of village green added into the mix.

“Dream a little bit,” he urged the session, then let fly with some of his own ideas. They included:

• Transforming a few blocks of central Dunbar into something special, with colour, catenary lighting (lights strung from overhead wires) and even angle parking. Hein said it’s worked well in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, which is considered to have one of the most beautiful high streets.
• Turning alleys into streets, like Watson Street behind a section of Main Street. Stores on parts of Dunbar could be double-fronted, “opening them up not to detract from retail viability on Dunbar itself but to bring more life to the lanes.” New housing, possibly townhouses over flats, could be built across the way, adding density to boost retail on Dunbar.
• Transforming the old Dunbar Produce store into a city-owned urban plaza with pop-ups. “You might pick up this site for a bit of a deal and if you want to host farmers’ markets on weekends, you have a place to stage that kind of thing.”
• Creating an off-arterial modest village green for people to convene or get away, perhaps by acquiring two 50-foot lots or through closing off part of a street.
• Zoning the city-owned library site to allow market housing on top, with a new 21^st century library built underneath, and proceeds from the housing going toward various community needs.
• Considering alternative residential housing types that fit into the village context, provide efficient, family-sized housing and include both non-market and below-market units.
• Working creatively with businesses to make public areas more interesting and inviting. Hein recalled how the London Drugs store at Olympic Village used glass shelving, backlighting and coloured water perfume bottles to create a “jewel-like” treat for plaza visitors at night. He said it’s hard to impose an idea like that, “but if you have a proactive relationship with your development partner, you can do some pretty interesting things.”

The right time to get the city involved

Hein said he was interested in doing the walkabout and planning session because he sees this as a “teachable moment” that residents can use to encourage the city to begin planning in a different way.

Residents can say, “’Okay, the Villages Plan failed and we have a better way and we’re here with you. We want to support you in doing this and we’ve taken some initiative and we’ve got some crude little diagrams to show you from just one little session and we want to keep going. Could you create a process for us?’”

One tour participant said he’s convinced the Dunbar group is headed in the right direction and should keep going, regardless of who gets elected Oct. 17 and how the new council responds.

“This is what we want, the residents want, the neighbourhood wants. If they don’t listen to us for the next four years, so be it. We will continue trying this because  I think this is the right thing to do.”